Staring at the Nanda Devi peak on a warm winter morning, Lal Singh, a magnificent 93, could never have imagined the change his region has undergone in the last two decades. He points towards the Kumaon Himalayas and says, “I’ve never seen these mountains naked in bare rock at this time of the year. Until… Read More Muddam Vijay Dixit Reddy: Mukteshwar in an ecological flux
At the end of last summer, Le Débat, France’s most prestigious intellectual review, accompanied its 40th-anniversary issue with a wholly unexpected announcement: It would cease publication forthwith. Le Débat and its three or four thousand loyal readers had maintained an allegiance to the political left since the Cold War — but the meaning of “left”… Read More Christopher Caldwell: Is This the End of French Intellectual Life?
In a year, bitcoin uses around the same about of electricity as the entire country of Norway. The digital currency is one that allows people to bypass banks and traditional payment methods. It is the most prominent among thousands of so-called cryptocurrencies and has been repeatedly reaching new records – but is it sustainable? The Guardian’s UK… Read More Why Bitcoin is so bad for the planet – video explainer
Kafka’s characters are almost always trapped – in a cage, a court case, an insect’s body, a false identity – and they share a feeling that the walls are closing in, and that a door, once there, is disappearing into the distance. This existential claustrophobia, at once vague and intense, resonates today, particularly under lockdown. … Read More Samuel Earle: Locking down with Kafka
One of the unfortunate temptations of the Trump era has been the rush to find radical breaks with the past where, in truth, the lines of continuity are strong. The themes of Trump’s speech were already well circulated among the Anglo-American elite, whether in the work of the political scientist Samuel Huntington or in the… Read More Book review: Pankaj Mishra’s Reckoning With Liberalism’s Bloody Past
NB: These books contain an exposure of contemporary nihilism at work. See also the links at the bottom of this post. DS Boris Johnson is “an unrepentant and inveterate liar” who feels he is not subject to the same rules as others, Sylvie Bermann, the former French ambassador to the UK during the Brexit vote, says… Read More Goodbye Britannia – books reviewed
The following conversation took place in December 2020. On the occasion of Jairus Banaji’s latest publication, A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism, Sheetal Chhabria and Andrew B. Liu spoke to contextualize his work within a multi-decade trajectory of history, theory, and labor organization, across Europe and Asia. We noted the particular significance of an original intervention… Read More “Where is the working class? It’s all over the world today”: Jairus Banaji in conversation with Sheetal Chhabria and Andrew Liu
NB: Contemporary conservative thought has a tendency to equate all social control, or even the hint of such control, as ‘communism’. Hence the antipathy toward activists such as Greta Thunberg, who simply asked for urgent measures to control damage to the environment. Note this paragraph from the article below: “The fight against climate change in… Read More Roger Sollenberger: What caused the Texas disaster? Decades of Republican deregulation: "Laissez-faire run amok"
Like Gregor Samsa, the never-to-be-forgotten character in Franz Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis,” we awoke on January 7th to discover that we, too, were “a giant insect” with “a domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments” and numerous “pitifully thin” legs that “waved helplessly” before our eyes. If you prefer, though, you can just say… Read More TOM ENGELHARDT: The American Century Ends Early
Since 2014, when “New India” was apparently inaugurated, we are in a remarkably similar phase of federalism as in the 1970s and early 1980s when the centre called the shots and state autonomy was constrained. With the “One Nation, One India” rhetoric now in the limelight, the era of “federalism without a centre” (Sáez 2002),… Read More K. K. Kailash: ‘One Nation’, New India and the Hollowing Out of the Federal Idea
